The Lansing Republican, the earliest precursor to the Lansing State Journal, published its first edition on April 28, 1855.
The weekly newspaper was started by Henry Barns, a strong abolitionist and a founding member of the Republican Party in Michigan. Barns arrived by stagecoach on April 24, 1855, the same year work began on the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, which became Michigan State University.
Four days later, the first edition of the paper was published. Barns would publish only one more issue before selling the paper and returning to Detroit. But now, Lansing had a weekly Republican paper in competition with the Democrat paper, the Lansing Journal. The paper’s first office was a log cabin at the corner of Washington Avenue and Ionia Street.
The new owners, Rufus Hosmer and George Fitch, both pledged support for the anti-slavery movement.
Over the subsequent decades, the name of the paper would change almost as often as the publishing site. A long succession of owners and editors would parade into and out of the picture, but the newspaper offices were always in, or close to downtown Lansing.
The Lansing Republican became the State Republican. When it began publishing two editions daily in 1910, its Democratic competitor suffered, and in 1911, the State Republican absorbed the Lansing Journal. A new newspaper, the State Journal, was born.
Ard Richardson and Charles Halsted bought the paper in 1914 and moved it to new headquarters at Grand Avenue and Ottawa Street,where it remained for more than 30 years.
Soon radio and television filled the air waves with news, and the State Journal needed to publish and distribute the paper faster.
Under the direction of longtime publisher Paul Martin in the late 1940s, plans for a new newspaper plant came together, and, in 1951, the paper had a new home at 120 E. Lenawee St. It was the Journal’s first newspaper plant, housing all facets of the operation.
The newspaper’s name became the Lansing State Journal in 1984 and in 1994, LSJ opened its first production facility in Delta Township. That facility closed in the summer of 2014.
The Lansing State Journal will move its offices to the Knapp’s Centre in January.
For the full article, with photos, see Vickki Dozier, “Lansing State Journal History”, Lansing State Journal, November 28, 2015.
I owe former Rep. Monte Geralds an apology.
Mr. Geralds was expelled from the House in 1978 after being convicted of embezzling from a law client. As I have previously written, he undertook his expulsion with dignity and grace. He was the first legislator in Michigan history to be expelled.
Or so I thought, and have reported for 37 years. So too did all the reporters covering the expulsion, so too did the legislators acting on the expulsion (which helped define the weight they felt when acting on the expulsion). And when the Senate expelled Sen. David Jaye in 2001, we again referred to Mr. Geralds as the first. And with expulsion talk swirling on Rep. Todd Courser and Rep. Cindy Gamrat, again we reported Mr. Geralds was the first.
But we were wrong, and thanks to a research librarian at the Library of Michigan we know now that the first legislator expelled in Michigan was Rep. Milo Dakin of Saginaw, a shingle inspector, serving his second term in the House when he was expelled in April 1887 for trying to bribe his colleagues.
Milo Dakin. Who was this fellow, this nefarious blackguard who so besmirched the House that the 94 members present and voting in the evening of April 28, 1887 (Mr. Dakin was present, but did not vote) decided unanimously to expel him, only to have him vanish in a way from history?
Well, he was an orphan at 13, a war veteran at 16, a laborer who worked on a farm, in mills and in the winter months in the woods as a shingle inspector. And who at 26 he was elected to the House as a fusion candidate, when the Greenback Party and the Democrats ran together.
From the Michigan Manual of 1887, Mr. Dakin describes himself thus: “His early years were such as usually fell to the lot of the children of our early pioneers. His parents both dying when he was but thirteen years of age, he was thrown upon his own resources. At fifteen he enlisted in Company C, Ninth Regiment Michigan cavalry, and served until the close of the war, eighteen months in all.” His little biography does not say, but in testimony during his House trial he pointed out that his regiment was attached to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman. So, with Mr. Sherman, Mr. Dakin marched to the sea, fighting in the engagements that leveled Atlanta and captured Savannah and effectively destroyed the Confederacy’s economy. He was discharged honorably.
He had no real education. After the war, he worked on a farm in Ionia County, then a sawmill in Montcalm County before removing to Saginaw County where he worked the saw mills in the summer and inspected shingles in the winter, and did this while serving in the House.
So what got him into trouble?
The House Journal that includes his trial and blustering oratory leading up to his expulsion vote is available online. Essentially, the city leaders of Saginaw wanted the Legislature to enact changes to their charter, and Mr. Dakin was expected to be one of the people to make that happen. How the charter was to be changed was not clear from the brief research.
It also appears Mr. Dakin offered a substitute to the Saginaw bill which horrified the city leaders. What it contained and why it so horrified the Saginaw fathers is also unclear. However, one does wonder if that substitute wasn’t part of what happened next.
Mr. Dakin was accused of getting money from Saginaw leaders, politicians and private citizens, to give to legislators and to help come up with names that could benefit from the money. Mr. Dakin was then accused of writing down a list of lawmakers and putting a price next to them. For the times it was probably big money, but the anticipated bribes ranged from $5 to $25.
Mr. Dakin acknowledged he was getting money from the Saginaw leaders, and expected the money, but it was to put on a dinner at the Eichele House, his Lansing rooming house, ostensibly to convince lawmakers to vote for the bill. The prosecution questioned how different amounts could be allocated to different men if it was all supposed to go for a “feast.” There were also accusations about spending it all on beer and cigars (which would have bought a lot of both at the time) and Mr. Dakin walking with a confederate to “North Lansing.” What that reference means is unknown, though the city had several houses of ill repute and one could wonder if it was a nudge-nudge-know what I mean statement.
Another remarkable thing about the expulsion was how quickly the House handled it. In little more than a week after charges were made, the House held a trial on the floor (after appropriating $200 to Mr. Dakin to hire his lawyers) and then voted to expel him.
In arguing for his expulsion, Rep. Gerrit Diekkema of Holland said, “I am also sorry for poor Dakin. God knows I am sorry for him; but the reputation of ninety-nine men sitting here in the Legislature of the State of Michigan should rise high above all feelings of mere sorrow for one man.” Their duty, he said, was to protect the good name of Michigan, instead of showing sympathy for one man who admitted he had done wrong.
Little is known of Mr. Dakin after he left the Legislature. He apparently stayed in Saginaw, married and had two sons. His wife died a number of years before him, and he died in 1927, eight years before Mr. Geralds was born.
For the full article, see John Lindstrom, “Okay, Correction, The First Legislator Ever Expelled Was…”, Gongwer Blog Post, September 3, 2015.
Abolitionist and civil rights activist William Lambert was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1817, the son of a manumitted father and a freeborn mother. As a young man Lambert was educated by abolitionist Quakers.
Twenty-three year old Lambert arrived in Detroit, Michigan in 1840 as a cabin boy on a steamboat, and eventually started a profitable tailoring and dry cleaning business. Upon his death Lambert left behind an estate estimated at $100,000. Lambert was also a founder of the St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church and served as one of its wardens.
In Detroit Lambert soon became active in the movement to secure suffrage for the black men of Michigan. He founded the Colored Vigilant Committee, Detroit’s first civil rights organization. In 1843 Lambert helped to organize the first State Convention of Colored Citizens in Michigan. He was subsequently elected chair of the convention and gave an address regarding the right to vote that was directed not only towards black people, but also to the white male citizens of the state. Lambert also worked to bring public education to the black children of Detroit.
Lambert was a friend of radical abolitionist John Brown and, like the more militant abolitionist leader Henry Highland Garnet, Lambert called for the slaves to rise up against their masters. At times Lambert very publicly helped fugitive slaves escape to Windsor, Canada, which was just across the Detroit River from the city of Detroit. Lambert’s most famous incident occurred in 1847, when he had the owner of fugitive slave Robert Cromwell thrown in jail so that Cromwell could escape to Canada by boat.
Much of Lambert’s abolitionist work, however, was done behind closed doors. Unlike the abolitionist movements which emerged in other Northern states, African Americans were excluded from Detroit’s Antislavery Society. Lambert later claimed to be the creator and president of the secret organization, African American Mysteries: Order of the Men of Oppression. In 1885, two decades after the end of slavery, he shared his story with the Detroit Tribune, and produced documents, including lists of transported slaves and correspondence with John Brown, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison.
The Order kept few physical records, and outside of Lambert’s and several other accounts, most of the evidence of its existence comes in the form of rumor and cryptic asides in the journals of white abolitionists. The Order was nearly exclusively African American in composition. Only a few white men rose past its lowest degrees. Lambert created three degrees, including an initiation modeled after a slave’s punishment. The Order had secret words, grips, rites, and solemnities, all of which were designed to prevent the uninitiated from receiving the higher knowledge that came with ascension, i.e., practical information pertaining to the business of their efforts to help black men and women escape out of the United States. Lambert claimed that, in its heyday, the Men of Oppression transported 1,600 slaves to their freedom per year, moving people through their network of homes and barns from the Ohio River to Lake Erie in ten days. While that number is an exaggeration, there is little doubt that this secret organization helped fugitive slaves flee to Canada.
William Lambert died on April 28, 1890, at the age of 73. He was buried in Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery.
Reposted from Black Past.org
Sources:
William Lambert wikipedia entry.
Katherine DuPre Lumpkin, “The General Plan Was Freedom”: A Negro Secret Order on the Underground Railroad,” Phylon, 28:1 (1st Qtr., 1967);
“William Lambert,” Detroit African-American History Project, Wayne.edu website
Evelyn Leasher, “William Lambert : An African American Leader of Detroit’s Anti-Slavery Movement“, Central Michigan University Clarke Historical Library, Underground Railroad collection.
Historic Elmwood Cemetery & Foundation
Herb Boyd, “William Lambert, Detroit’s Great Underground Railroad Conductor“, New Amsterdam News, March 16, 2017.
On April 28, 1896, the Detroit Tigers baseball franchise in the Western League (pre-cursor of the American League) played its first official game at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, then known as Bennett Park in honor of former Detroit catcher Charlie Bennett. The game was a 17-2 victory over the Columbus Senators.
Team owner George Arthur Van Der Beck spent $10,000 to build the 5,000-seat ballpark.
The Corner would later become Navin Field (1912), Briggs Stadium (1938) and Tiger Stadium (1961). The last game was played there Sept. 27, 1999. For many Detroiters, however, the place was known simply as the Corner.
Sources :
Zlati Meyer, This Week in Michigan History, Detroit Free Press, April 26, 2009.
William Harris of Norwood introduced the legislation proposing that the apple blossom be adopted as the official state flower of Michigan on February 9, 1897.
Joint Resolution No. 10 noted that apple trees add to “the beauty” of Michigan’s landscape and that “Michigan apples have gained a worldwide reputation.”
Citing the blossom of the native Michigan Pyrus coronaria (sweet crabapple) as particularly beautiful and fragrant, the legislation does not specify this species as the state flower but refers to the generic apple blossom as the state flower of Michigan.
Michigan adopted the blossom of the apple tree as its state flower by an act of the legislature on April 28, 1897.
Pyrus coronaria is now referred to as Malus coronaria.
The following information is excerpted from the Michigan Compiled Laws, Chapter 2, Section 2.11.
STATE FLOWER
J.R. 10 of 1897
A JOINT RESOLUTION to designate and adopt a state flower.
2.11 State flower.
WHEREAS, A refined sentiment seems to call for the adoption of a state flower; and
WHEREAS, Our blossoming apple trees add much to the beauty of our landscape, and Michigan apples have gained a worldwide reputation; and
WHEREAS, At least one of the most fragrant and beautiful flowered species of apple, the pyrus coronaria, is native to our state; therefore
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Michigan, That the apple blossom be and the same hereby is designated and adopted as the state flower of the state of Michigan.
History: 1897, J.R. 10, Imd. Eff. Apr. 28, 1897 ;– CL 1897, 1755 ;– CL 1915, 1096 ;– CL 1929, 133 ;– CL 1948, 2.11
© 2004 Legislative Council, State of Michigan
Source: Michigan State Flower.
On April 28, 1910, the Flint Police Department ordered the first “paddy wagon”, a truck with a cage to hold prisoners, from the Buick Motor Company.
Source : Historical Society of Michigan
- Police Paddy Wagons were available for sale as early as 1907. Here’s an item spotted on Amazon. 1907 Oldsmobile Police Paddy Wagon Truck ORIGINAL LinenBack Factory. Photo courtesy of R. C. Leavenworth’s Commercial Photo Service, Lansing, Michigan.
- In 1909, the Lansing Police Department received an Olds Touring Car called the Black Maria on loan which looks almost identical to the car above. Light gauge wire was used to enclose a holding area to deter escapes. The Lansing Police Department was among the first in the nation to have an auto patrol.
- Daniel Rivero, “A complete history of the phrase ‘paddy wagon,’ the surviving Irish-American slur, SplinterNews, March 16, 2016.
On April 28th, 1959, Air Force Captain John S. Lappo, a native of Muskegon, Michigan, flew his B-47 nuclear bomber under the Mackinac bridge connecting southern Michigan to the so-called “Upper Peninsula”.
The Mackinac Bridge is five miles long but there is only 155 feet maximum clearance between the bottom of the deck and the waters of the Great Lakes (Lake Huron and Lake Michigan) below. The B-47 bomber is 28 feet high, meaning there wasn’t much margin for error in Lappo’s flying.
The B-47 was one of America’s first jet-powered bombers. The B-47 first flew in 1947 and was the Air Force’s primary medium range nuclear bomber until 1965. The B-47 could cruise at 550 miles an hour and carry 25,000 pounds of bombs. In a nuclear war it would carry two Mk. 15 thermonuclear bombs, each of which had an explosive yield of 3.8 megatons. More than 2,000 of the bombers were produced.
By today’s standards, the B-47 was incredibly unsafe—203 aircraft were lost to crashes (10 percent of the airplanes produced) killing 464 aircrew.
As Task & Purpose points out, U.S. Military aircraft at the time were prohibited from flying with 500 feet of the ground. According to newspaper accounts at the time the entire incident went unreported and indeed nobody on the ground may have actually seen it. Tragically, there is no video evidence of this incredible (and dangerous) stunt.
Nevertheless Lappo was reported through the military chain of command and brought before a court martial. Lappo was fined $300 (the equivalent of $2,615 in today’s dollars) to be paid $50 a month over a six month period.
Lappo was also grounded—forever. That having been said, he did retire after two more promotions to the rank of lieutenant colonel, so he wasn’t in the doghouse forever.
Source : Kyle Mizokami, “Sixty Years Ago, a Pilot Flew a B-47 Nuclear Bomber Under Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge“, Popular Mechanics, April 30, 2019.
First lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday reflected on her own family’s rise from slavery to the White House as she helped to unveil a statue of abolitionist Sojourner Truth — the first black woman to be so honored at the Capitol.
“I hope that Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as the first lady of the United States of America,” Mrs. Obama said to loud applause at a ceremony at the Capitol Visitor Center.
An early crusader for women’s right to vote and for an end to slavery, Truth met presidents Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1870, and delivered her signature “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. Truth, a former slave, tried to vote on two occasions, but was turned away both times. She died in November 1883 at her home in Battle Creek, Mich.
Lawmakers, students and actress Cicely Tyson were among those who gathered at the visitor’s center to celebrate Truth’s legacy and watch Mrs. Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others unveil the bronze bust of Truth.
“We’re here because of barriers she challenged and fought to tear down, and paths she helped to forge and trod alone,” Clinton said to an audience made up mostly of women.
For the full article, see Ann Sanner, “First lady honors abolitionist Sojourner Truth”, Oakland Press, April 28, 2009.
Also see Sojourner Truth Bust
Hair Wars started in the Detroit nightclubs in 1985 as an informal stage show for local hair stylists to show off their hair creations. Disc jockey David Humphries, a.k.a. “Hump The Grinder,” came up with this concept as one of his ‘gimmick parties’ to keep things interesting in the clubs. What began as a 4-week hair promotion, lasted several years, as more and more hair stylists took advantage of this opportunity to showcase their work. They had no other platform to show off their hair creations. Beauty schools eventually became involved, and that took on a separate division, which was named the “Hair Wars Beauty School Showdown,” a grooming center for Hair Wars.
Eventually, the hair segment of the parties got so popular, the full-time focus was promoting and marketing ‘Hair Entertainment.’ In 1991 the performances moved from the clubs into larger venues and what was a party with a little hair became lots of hair with an after party.
In 1994 Hair Wars went on its first road trip to Los Angeles, where several of Detroit’s top hair stylists performed and Southern California hair stylists, along with many others from around the country, joined the tour as it traveled to several cities. Some of the top cities other than Detroit on the tour include: Columbus (OH); Oakland; San Diego; Chicago; Raleigh; Dallas; Atlanta; New York; Las Vegas; Miami and the Caribbean.
Hair instructional seminars are also a big part of Hair Wars. Top hair educators have been teaching new techniques and creating new trends in over 25 cities since the educational tours began in 1992. Hair Wars is still known for showcasing the hottest trendsetting hair stylists in the U.S.
A 1996 front page story in The Wall Street Journal. started the media blitz that has never stopped. A Dateline NBC feature and an appearance on Oprah quickly followed. Once that occurred, media from all over the world wanted a piece of the ‘hair entertainment’ world.
Hair Wars has been dedicated to producing and promoting hair stylists as ‘hair entertainers’ and ‘hair celebrities,’ and has become the main source for many TV shows, record companies, movie studios and publications for hair talent.
Just recently, Hair Wars has developed a new division called The Hair Wars Ad Agency, where the company promotes hair stylists, salons and hair companies to the hair industry and general public. Advertising packages include: internet advertising; email blasting; print ads; and radio & TV commercials.
Hair Wars has been approached by several Hollywood studios about a reality show, but all the offers have been turned down because Hair Wars doesn’t fit the image of what the producers want. When the right situation comes along, Hair Wars will represent the hair industry as a positive, innovative and powerful force. Until then, Hair Wars will continue to travel the nation and parts of the world, while continuing to build the brand name. Hair Wars has reached an estimated 100 million people.
For more information about Detroit’s Annual Hair Wars, see http://hairwarsustour.com, or 313-534-8318.
Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars Facebook Page
2018 Detroit Hump the Grinder Hair Wars Highlights
The hair stars turning wigs and weaves into fantastical works of art: Ahead of the 2018 Hair Wars show, founder David ‘Hump The Grinder’ Humphries looks back on over 30 years of incrediblehair creations via Dazed Website.
Damon Keith, a grandson of slaves who rose from humble beginnings in Detroit to become an internationally-revered champion for justice and a much-loved father-figure who launched countless legal careers, died Sunday morning at his home in Detroit.
Lawyers and legal scholars from all over the nation were drawn to his Detroit chambers, a place adorned with photos of the many famous people whose lives he touched, including Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela and President Barack Obama.
The longest-serving black judge in the nation, Keith was a leading citizen of Detroit — a confidant of elected officials, civic leaders and those who fight for social justice.
His impact on Detroit and his fight for equality under the law is visible from the Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University to his chambers in the federal building on Lafayette Avenue to the Wright Museum of African American History, which Keith rescued from closure several years ago.
Son of a factory worker
Keith himself often marveled at how he rose from the son of a Ford factory worker to friend and comrade of the Ford family. His story is well-told in a book that documents his life and work, “Crusader for Justice,” by Peter J. Hammer and Trevor Coleman, released in 2013.
Asked what he wants people to know about him after reading it, Keith said, “He did the best he could with his God-given talent, and he used his life and the law to try to make things better for all Americans.”
Keith burst onto the national stage in 1970 when, as a U.S. District Court judge, he ordered busing to desegregate Pontiac schools. It was the first decision on behalf of federal court-ordered busing outside of southern states.
On the District Court and later with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Keith wielded the Constitution as a weapon — handing down a remarkable series of landmark decisions that struck blows against segregated schools, employment and housing discrimination, and federal wiretapping policies.
“One cannot be around Damon for very long without sensing his commitment to all that is good about our country,” Judge Peter Fay, of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia, said in 1998 in nominating Keith for the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award.
“But unlike many, he does not limit his commitment to words — his actions speak volumes,” Fay added. “He gets involved. He spends the time. He does the work … there is nothing he will not do if he is convinced it will help others and strengthen our way of life.”
Among his landmark cases: In 1971, Keith ruled that President Richard Nixon and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell violated the U.S. Constitution by wiretapping student radicals in Ann Arbor without a court order. In 2002, he wrote one of the most quoted phrases in American legal history in Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, while he was on the US. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The court ruled that deportation hearings held in private was unconstitutional. Keith put it this way:
“Democracies die behind closed doors.”
Faith and great role models
Whenever Keith was asked what drove him to achieve, his answer was the same — faith in God and great role models.
From a kid growing up on the segregated streets of Detroit to a student at an all-black college in West Virginia to a budding lawyer at Howard University, Keith credited those who had set the examples for him.
The inspiration began with his father Perry Keith, a $5-an-day Ford Rouge foundry worker who taught his son that he was somebody. It continued with black college professionals who helped Keith realize that he could triumph in a society that was not hospitable to the idea of equal treatment or opportunity for all.
And it took Thurgood Marshall, the fiery civil rights warrior and eventual U.S. Supreme Court justice, to show Keith how he could use the courts and the U.S. Constitution to battle segregation and Jim Crow laws.
“I just feel as though I have an obligation to do something to make things better for all people,” Keith told the Free Press in 2002. “God put me here for some purpose, and I don’t want to let Him down. And I don’t want to let myself down, or my family, my people — or my country.”
Keith often acted more like a politician than a federal judge. He made connections with community leaders of all backgrounds. He liked to surround himself with people and treated them with affection. He was a hugger.
Every year, he hosted a Soul Food Luncheon at the federal courthouse in Detroit where members of the legal community, elected officials, corporate leaders and celebrities showed up to network, have a good time and pay homage to a high community achiever that Keith singled out annually.
“It would be so easy to get isolated in these beautiful chambers where you don’t have to run for re-election or see anyone,” Keith once said. “It’s easy, when people are always saying, ’your honor’ and bowing and scraping, to get things out of balance. That’s why it’s important to get out in the community to mingle … and see what the problems are.”
Keith didn’t smoke or drink and rarely swore.
Former law clerks said he almost never lost his temper, and he prided himself on never using a gavel because he didn’t need it to control his courtroom.
Giving back
The Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights opened at Wayne State University in 2011. The $5.7-million addition to the WSU Law School chronicles Keith’s judicial career, the legal history of the civil rights movement and the accomplishments of African-American lawyers and judges.
The walls of Keith’s chambers are decorated with dozens and dozens of photos of celebrities and civil rights leaders Keith has known over the years, including the late Aretha Franklin and the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“This is a history of my life and experiences,” he once said. “When people come in, they see blacks and whites, rich and poor, the mayor, educators, Henry Ford II, Martin Luther King Jr.”
Keith did have his battles — he butted heads with longtime Detroit NAACP leader Wendell Anthony over management of the organization, which Keith helped pioneer years earlier. And he felt slighted by Wade McCree, the first black U.S. District Court judge in eastern Michigan (whose seat Keith filled in 1967) for not endorsing him for the federal bench.
One of Keith’s biographers, former Free Press editorial writer Trevor Coleman, said the judge sometimes had a difficult time overlooking slights because he was forever affected by those who said he wasn’t good enough to be a federal judge.
“Some implied that because he didn’t go to an Ivy League school, pass the bar exam the first time out, or work in government as a lawyer, that he wasn’t qualified,” Coleman said. “He spent his lifetime proving them wrong.”
He also spent a lifetime giving back.
When an intruder attacked Rosa Parks in her Detroit home in 1994, Keith arranged through his friend A. Alfred Taubman, the late shopping mall magnate, to have her move into a gated apartment complex on the riverfront.
When she was invited to Montgomery, Ala., to attend the opening of a museum named in her honor, Keith again called on Taubman to fly her in his private jet.
When Parks died in 2005, Keith chaired the group that planned funerals in three cities.
It was easy for Keith to go to Taubman, a philanthropist, because the two had developed a close bond over many years.
“He’s a highly intelligent man, very hard-working, very determined,” Taubman, a longtime friend, had said. “I have great admiration for him so it’s not unusual for us to be friends.”
Keith relished being a civic leader, even when it could have gotten him into trouble.
In 2004, he convened a meeting of Detroit political, business and civic leaders at the courthouse to raise $1 million to keep the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History afloat.
Keith insisted that he merely invited the guests but didn’t solicit money, which would have violated the federal judicial code. “We blacks who are in positions of power and authority … have an obligation to save this museum,” he said.
Said Rod Gillum, a General Motors Foundation chairman and museum board member who attended the meeting: “Judge Damon Keith is one of the few individuals who is capable of putting together a group of prominent citizens on such short notice.”
During the 1980s, there was talk that Keith might be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court like his hero, Thurgood Marshall. But it didn’t happen. Republicans controlled the White House in the 1980s, when Keith was in his prime.
If he was disappointed, he never let on publicly.
Overcoming racism
Though he experienced racism, Keith didn’t let it make him bitter.
When he began practicing law in the 1950s, there were few black lawyers and no black judges.
“Arguing a case before a judge was quite humiliating at times because of the way judges treated black lawyers at that time,“ Keith told the Free Press in 1984. “I’ve had judges in (Detroit) Recorders Court tell me to shut up or sit down or not go any further and, if I did, they’d hold me in contempt.”
The slights didn’t end when he became a judge.
He often told audiences about the time he attended a judicial conference in Virginia after becoming a federal appeals judge. While walking in the hotel parking lot with a white judge, a man drove up, tossed his keys to Keith and asked him to park his car.
Keith’s colleague was horrified, but Keith told him to calm down because he was accustomed to being reminded every day that he was black.
After graduating from law school in 1949, he twice failed his bar exam. He got his law license by appealing the second score and having his grade bumped up to a passing grade.
The episode caused some in Detroit’s black legal community to regard Keith as a legal lightweight and nearly prevented him from being appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. District Court in 1967.
“Up to that point, Damon was well-known for being about in the community, but the so-called conventional wisdom was that he was not a jurisprudential heavyweight,” the late Kenneth Cockrel Sr., the legendary activist lawyer and Detroit city councilman, told the Free Press in 1984. “Many people — and I include myself — were quite pleasantly surprised.”
Keith’s biggest setback came in January 2007. His wife of 53 years, Rachel Boone Keith, a retired internist and racial and gender trailblazer in Detroit’s medical community, collapsed and died.
His wife, the daughter of Baptist missionaries, was born in Liberia. A mutual friend introduced them while she was finishing her residency at Detroit Receiving Hospital. They married two years later, in 1953.
They had three children: Cecile Keith-Brown, Debbie Keith and Gilda Keith and two granddaughters, Nia Keith Brown and Camara Keith Brown. Throughout their marriage, he trekked most Saturday mornings to Eastern Market to buy flowers for her. On Saturday afternoons, they had a standing date to go to the movies.
During four decades on the bench, he hired more women and minority law clerks — African Americans, Hispanics, Asians — than any federal judge. He encouraged them to help others as he had helped them.
“A network of people throughout Michigan and the United States have obtained gainful employment, gone to college or graduate or professional school, secured personal loans, or advanced their careers at crucial stages, as a direct result of selfless efforts by Judge Keith,” said U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay, who clerked for Keith in 1972-73.
Early years
Damon Jerome Keith was born in Detroit on July 4, 1922, in a house near the present I-96 and I-94 freeway interchange.
He was the youngest of seven children of Perry and Annie Louise (Williams) Keith. His father had moved the family from Georgia in the 1920s to get a job in a Ford plant.
Keith once said that “most kids in my neighborhood did not go to college — most went to Jackson prison.” His father insisted that college was in young Damon’s future.
After graduating from Northwestern High in 1939, Keith enrolled at West Virginia State College and worked his way through college by cleaning the chapel and waiting tables in a dining hall.
In 1943, after watching his son graduate, Perry Keith told him: “One of my children has a college degree. Now I can die happy.”
Less than a week later, Perry Keith was dead.
“My father was the finest man I’ve ever known,” Keith told the Free Press in 1998.
After college, Keith was drafted into the segregated U.S. Army and spent three years driving a truck in the Quartermaster Corps during World War II in Europe. Keith called it an “absolutely degrading,” partly because the “all-colored” unit didn’t have a single black officer.
He was discharged in 1946 as a sergeant.
“After coming back and having to ride on the back of buses while seeing German soldiers ride in the front and seeing German soldiers go into restaurants in the South that I could not go into, I made up my mind I was going to become a lawyer,” he said in 2002.
He enrolled on the GI Bill at Howard University in Washington. He helped research civil rights cases, participated in mock trials and watched rising legal stars like Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, practice his legal arguments and argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
From janitor to federal judge
After getting his law degree in 1949, Keith worked as a janitor at the Detroit News while studying for his bar exam.
He became a $15-a-week clerk for Loomis, Jones, Piper & Colden, a black law firm, and later returned to the firm as a full-fledged lawyer. He received a Master’s in Law in 1956 from Wayne State University and in 1964 opened his own law firm, which eventually became known as Keith, Conyers, Anderson, Brown & Wahls.
His partners included Nathan Conyers, the eventual Detroit car dealer and brother of former U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. The firm moved into the Guardian Building, becoming the first black law firm in the city’s all-white legal district.
Keith, a Democrat, also served as a Wayne County commissioner (1958-63), president of the Detroit Housing Commission (1958-67) and co-chair of the state’s first Civil Rights Commission (1964-67).
His big break came in 1967 after President Johnson elevated McCree to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Keith wanted to fill McCree’s slot, and Johnson wound up selecting him at the request of U.S. Rep. Philip Hart, D-Mich., after Otis Smith, the first black to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court, dropped out to become the first black member of General Motors’ legal staff.
Legal rulings
In 1970, after Keith ordered citywide busing to desegregate Pontiac public schools, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to kill him — prompting federal marshals to guard his home. Keith didn’t back down.
“I have not lost one hour of sleep,” he said. “I thrive on making difficult decisions. That is why I enjoy being a federal judge.”
In 1971, Keith ruled that President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell violated the constitutional rights of three radical White Panther Party members, whose phones were tapped without a court order during an investigation of the bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ruling, which became known as the “Keith Case.”
The same year, Keith ordered the city of Hamtramck to build low-income housing after razing black neighborhoods to make way for the Chrysler Freeway. Keith said the city engaged in “Negro removal” in the name of urban renewal.
In 1973, he ordered Detroit Edison to pay $4 million to black employees who were victims of job discrimination and ordered it to create an affirmative action program. He also ordered the union to pay $250,000 for failing to protect the workers.
“I began to think the blind draw wasn’t blind,” Keith said about being randomly assigned to so many high-profile cases.
In 1974, Keith’s work was recognized by the NAACP, which awarded him its highest honor — the Spingarn Medal.
Then-President Jimmy Carter elevated Keith to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1977.
In 1979, Keith wrote an opinion upholding a lower court decision ordering the Detroit Police Department to carry out Coleman Young’s plan to integrate the department.
And in 2002, seven years after going on senior — part-time — status, Keith wrote another opinion that made history, finding that Attorney General John Ashcroft and the George W. Bush administration had to open up deportation proceedings for people linked to terrorism.
The famous line from that opinion — “Democracies die behind closed doors” — became a rallying cry for news organizations battling federal secrecy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In recounting his legal career, Keith once said: “I really didn’t know what kind of judge I’d be… I knew I wanted to try to be the kind of judge that would make attorneys want to be in his court.
“Putting on the robes can be an awesome responsibility. You have the chance to find out a lot about yourself.
“It’s like Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘If you want to know what a man really is, give him power.’”
In 2009, a CNN reporter ran into Keith and his granddaughter, Camara, who was 12 at the time, while they were in Washington for President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“I’m here today to see this man become president of the United States,” Keith told the reporter, on the verge of tears.
“It’s a great event,” he said. “It shows what can happen in America. We’re a good people.”
One of his proudest moments happened several years ago, May 2013, when his granddaughter, Nia Keith Brown, graduated from Emory University School of Law. The proud grandpa hooded his granddaughter during the ceremony in Atlanta. A few months later he held a private family ceremony in a federal courtroom where he swore her into the Michigan Bar.
Keith lived the advice he said he’d give today to young lawyers such as Nia.
“I tell them — and this is a phrase that’s so important — they are walking on floors they did not scrub and they’re going through doors they did not open … open doors that didn’t open for you so others can come through. We’ve got to leave a legacy.”
Sources :
Cassandra Spratling and David Ashenfelter, “Federal judge, civil rights icon Damon Keith dies at age 96“, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2019.
Mitch Albom, “Judge Damon Keith, an extraordinary man, who stared down hate”, Detroit Free Press, April 28, 2019.